Hosted by The Green Dragon Pub (928 SE 9th), the farmers market style event takes place on SE 9th between Belmont and Yamhill from 10am to 4pm. Activities include seminars on pairing cheese with distilled spirits, demonstrations on how to make cheese at home, and contests and prizes for the kids. Visit the website for more details.

As the cheese fest winds down, head over to the EastBurn (1800 E Burnside) to celebrate another fantastically arteriosclerotic food: bacon. The 2009 Portland Baconfest, a Bacon Extravagana for the Masses runs from 3 to 10pm.

Yes, there will be bacon eating contests! Other bacony activities include a bacon dance off, a bacon confessional, and count the bacon.

Something truly unique is occurring in Portland—a craft distillation revolution. A handful of innovative small distilleries are making handcrafted, locally distilled spirits available for the first time since prohibition. The heart of this movement lies in an inconspicuous neighborhood of small warehouses and light industrial buildings in Southeast Portland, known as the lower east-side industrial district. In a strip 16 blocks long and five blocks wide, five independent distilleries (housing seven spirits companies) have begun producing over twenty unique liquors. They make everything from vodkas and gins, rums and whiskeys, to more specialized spirits such as absinthe,
aquavit, and flavored liqueurs.

Presently the site consists only of a map (reproduced on the right), a brief introduction, and individual pages for each of the distilleries in Distillery Row. The distillery pages include tasting room and contact information.

Last fall I had the privilege of touring two of the distilleries on Portland’s Distillery Row. Read the accounts here:

The teams face again in Portland on October 4th at 4pm at PGE Park in the second leg. Buy your tickets now!

The surprising Whitecaps, the 7th seed, upended the 2nd seeded Carolina Railhawks in the first round. Inexplicably Carolina left three top scorers at home in the first leg at Vancouver, where a 72nd minute goal by the Whitecaps’ Randy Edwini-Bonsu proved the series winner; in Carolina Sunday the teams drew 0-0.

Portland opened the regular season with a 1-0 loss in Vancouver, but then defeated Vancouver twice at PGE 2-0 in May, and 1-0 in August, to clinch the team’s first ever Cascadia Cup.

For those of us not lucky enough to be traveling to Vancouver, BC for the first leg of the series, here’s where you can watch the match. Kickoff Thursday is at 7:30 pm:

The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival promotes the works of H.P. Lovecraft, literary horror, and weird tales through the cinematic adaptations by professional and amateur filmmakers. The festival was founded in 1995 by Andrew Migliore in the hope that H.P. Lovecraft would be rightly recognized as a master of gothic horror and his work more faithfully adapted to film and television.